Stepper Driver / PSU / Breakout board Wiring ?

[manofgresley]

Hi All

Not sure if this is the right section for this, but here goes.

I now have my Stepper motors & Drivers, a Breakout Board and PSU. My question is this - What size/gauge wires do I need to connect these items (The Motors are already wired). Can anyone supply I good hard wire schematic I could use. I appreciate I need a panel mounted E Stop & On/Off switch, but do I need to put in extra fuses, in the control (240vac) circuit?

Regards

Ray

[irving2008]

If you are refering to just the low voltage side (NOT stepper motor wiring, but breakout board to drivers and the 5V PSU for these, plus limit/home switches) then normal equipment wire 7/0.2 is fine e.g. Equipment Wire (7/0.2) : Equipment Wire : Maplin Electronics (http://www.maplin.co.uk/equipment-wire-7-0.2-6192) For the stepper motors back to their PSU you'll need something heavier, either 24/0.2 or 32/0.2, or you can use 4-core flexible mains cable.

As to the schematic, it depends on the actual board/drivers you have. but there are several on the site, try using the search function.

[Jonathan]

I've used 2-core mains cable before now for PSU to stepper drivers - just make sure it's quite thick stuff so at least 1mm^2.
Also don't wire the drivers power from one to the next to the next... instead use a 'star' configuration so each driver has it's own two power wires going back to the power supply. If you didn't you would need a much larger cable size.

A neat option for the stepper driver step/direction inputs is to use 4-core alarm cable as this tends to be 7/0.2.